Efraim "Fima" Nisan lives in Jerusalem, but feels he ought to be somewhere else. In his life he has had secret love affairs, good ideas, and written a book of poems that aroused expectations. He has thought about the purpose of the universe and where his beloved country lost its way. He has felt longings of all sorts, and the constant desire to pen a new chapter. And here he is now, in his early fifties in a shabby apartment on a gloomy wet morning, engaged in a humiliating struggle to release his shirt from the zipper of his fly.
With his mordant wit and penetrating insight, Amos Oz is widely regarded as "the most accomplished-and, certainly, the most celebrated-of contemporary Israeli novelists.
